iPhone 4 Teardown

Teardown

We stripped the iPhone 4 down to its basic components. Apple definitely spent time giving the phone a thorough makeover, meticulously changing every little facet. We are happy to splay the fruits of their labor for your enjoyment!

We have confirmed that the iPhone's A4 processor has 512 MB RAM, unlike the iPad's more limited 256 MB. This decision may have been made fairly late in Apple's development cycle, because early leaked prototype phones only had 256 MB.

Like the iPhone 3G and 3GS, there are two silver Phillips #000 screws at the bottom of the phone. Note: newer iPhone 4 handsets use 5-point "pentalobe" screws instead, requiring the use of a special screwdriver.

In a departure from the design of the 3G and 3GS, removing the screws releases the rear case, not the front glass.

Luckily, the battery can be easily removed once the back panel assembly is out of the way.

The 3.7V 1420 mAh Li-Polymer battery allows for up to 7 hours of talk time on 3G or up to 14 hours on 2G.

The battery connector is different than the one in the 3G and 3GS. Fortunately, the battery is not soldered to the logic board. This will make battery replacement on the iPhone 4 fairly easy to accomplish.

The plastic pull tab for the battery says "Authorized Service Provider Only."

Apple has gone a step further and tuned the phone to utilize whichever network band is less congested or has the least interference for the best signal quality, regardless of the actual signal strength. Early reports suggest this feature, while buggy in its early stages, will greatly improve the phone's reliability on AT&T's fragile network.

Just to the left of the A4 package, the AGD1 is the new 3 axis gyroscope that we believe is designed and manufactured by ST Micro for Apple. The package marks on this device do not appear to be the currently available commercial part, L3G4200D. The commercial version of this gyroscope is yet to be released — Apple got first dibs on it.

The front glass panel of the iPhone is reported to be constructed of Corning Gorilla Glass, a chemically strengthened alkali-aluminosilicate thin sheet glass that is reported to be 20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic.

Gorilla Glass holds many advantages as the iPhone 4's front panel, including its high resistance to wear and increased strength from an ion-exchange chemical strengthening process.

LED Backlight for the LCD.

Unfortunately, the LCD panel is very securely glued to the glass and digitizer, with the entire assembly measuring 3.05mm thick. It appears that if you break the glass, you'll have to replace the iPhone 4's glass, digitizer, and LCD as a single assembly.

Apple is following in the footsteps of the Nexus One by using dual microphones to help improve audio quality and suppress background noise.

Interestingly, the two microphones are positioned at the two far ends of the phone. The microphone at the top of the iPhone is most likely utilized for capturing background noise to be analyzed by internal circuitry and used to cancel any noise put into the main microphone other than the user's voice.

You can also see the ambient light sensor which adjusts the iPhone's brightness as lighting conditions change.

The proximity sensor sits right next to the ambient light sensor. This will turn the display off when you bring the phone up to your ear thus preventing any touch interaction while it's pressed up against ear.

Obviously creating antennas out of the frame pieces didn't work well for them... how obvious it should be that you should not touch an antenna and expect the radio to work. The "dual-band" enhancement is worthless - cellular got kicked off the 800-900 MHz spectrum.

EXTREAMLLY bad teardown guide. If It hadn't been for the fact that I have taken one apart before I would have killed the phone. No ref on screw sizes, no explanation on where force should be applied.............. REALLY BAD!!!!!!!!!

We are glad to hear that you are looking to our site for guidance. However, we would like to make sure you know that the Teardown Flag at the top of all teardowns explains, "Teardowns provide a look inside a device and should not be used as disassembly instructions." We strongly urge users not to follow teardowns, as they are intended for information and entertainment. Luckily, we have this extremely comprehensive list of guides (as opposed to teardowns) right here.

Most people think the iPhone 4 has 512mb of ram but if you jailbreak it you can find that after boot up from a complete power off, before the damens are loaded (those are unix based startup codes that start basic apps like the SpringBoard and the phone app) you have 615gm of installed ram but because of those damens you only have 512gb but there are some useless damens you don't need that you can delete to save ram. Also on my iPhone 4 (4.0.1 15gb) there is a 1gb parton for the iOS making the 15gb to a 14gb, I don't know why the 32gb is any different. Also 512gb of RAM is the right amount to run winowds 95, to bad apple used a unix base for the iPhone and their computers. ;(

One thing which is nothing to do with what you're doing, but I can't pass by without making a remark: Thanks for the care you've given to your fingernails:) I hate people with dirty fingernails! Keep up the good work.

Interesting that the back panel and battery are so easily removed. I'd love to see a third party make some back panels for something like conductive charging similar to the palm pre, or make a smaller sized battery to add some space in there to stuff some interesting little hacks. Maybe like a car remote or RFID stuff.

If it is shielding, then the conductive spot is connected to ground (battery, or case). If it is an antenna, then it is connected to an inductors pin.

Some Chinese-sourced backplates completely ignore this design detail and no one has complained about diminished functionality. However, if the shield is not on place, the FCC might say something for radiation pollution.

The battery is glued into place and needs to be pried away, which will often deform the battery. So long as you do not puncture the casing, it should be ok to flatten it back into shape and reinsert it into the system. If you puncture the casing, you should get a new battery or risk excessive heat and possibly a risk of explosion.

Sorry to ruin the magic, but that "EMI shield" is actually the Wi-Fi antenna. The phone antenna is in the speaker enclosure removed in Step 12. The steel frame acts as a ground plane, not actually as a radiating antenna.

Repairing an iPhone 4, but I don't have that screw as displayed in the photo. As a matter of fact the inside doesn't look the same. Also, the phone I am repairing does not have the SIM card on the side either. Am I missing something? I double checked. This is an iPhone 4...

I say apple should stop trying to mack the Ipod so thin and put a 5MP or higher camra inside the Ipod touch 5g and put a better sounding speaker in it to I also say they should mack the screen a 4.5 inch display

Remove your simcard tray before removing the logic board. Also if you follow this guide, two screws hold down the motherboard one is a standoff screw the other a regular screw in the middle of the logic board.

In 3GPP cellular networks, the decision to move from one frequency to another is up to the network to decide. The terminal can only say "I would like to go to this frequency or neighboring cell". Further it is not likely that the phone is measuring congestion of the network. Once again that is a parameter that the network should be monitoring and should be moving the terminals around (also called a handover) from cell to cell and frequency to frequency.

In reality, the AT&T network gear vendors have probably improved their handling of congestion.

As every high frequency engineer knows, touching an open antenna will detune it considerably. Was surprised to read about the open antenna design and subsequently the first reception problems with the design are reported.

Upon doing some research it seems the info listed in Step 16 is taken directly from a Sprint EVO 4G teardown from ChipWorks, for whatever reason. It's not the same list as on the iFixit teardown of the Sprint EVO 4G.

Also, the Triquint chip shown in the image is not the same number as shown in the associated text column. They do note this is a work in progress so we should give them some leeway, though posting erroneous info is pushing it, even if it is just a placeholder.

Based on examination of the photos, yes, it sure seems like that list is incorrect. One of the TriQuint chips sure looks like TQM676091, which doesn't seem to exist, but TQM676021 does exist and is an HSUPA chip.

From looking at the Broadcom site about that part it appears to be a utility chip that they rolled out to replace older parts (probably the ones in previous iPhones etc) The chip supports both 2.4 and 5ghz for full wifi a/b/g/n and includes the FM transmit and receive. Steve Jobs said in the Keynote that iPhone 4 supports wifi n at 2.4ghz only so FM Transmit won't be the only thing available on chip not in use.

However the main feature Apple probably looked at was the improved battery life and reduced 65nm process. The chip appears to serve Apple's engineering conditions and be not utilising some features they can reduce the draw on the power.

I don't think we will see FM Tx from this new device as I don't think we will see 5ghz wifi n (or wifi a). If they had an application of the tech ready to go Steve would have shown it off, as they didn't show it I don't think it will be activated later. However if they find a "compelling" reason to activate it we should see appearances in the next year and the hardware *could* support it.

That oval copper thing in the center looks like a low-frequency inductor-type antenna. It has two spring leads that contact the back of the circuit board. Could this be used for near field communications/RFID?

How do you know that it is Gorilla Glass if Corning does not publicly release which devices are equipped with their glass? Additionally, the product information for the iPhone 4 calls it aluminosilicate glass, but it does not say that it is alkali-aluminosilicate. As you know, there are many applications of aluminosilicate glass other than alkali, including boron-aluminosilicate glass.

I'm hoping that the LCD being bonded to the glass will prevent dust from entering the display. All I know is that my original iPhone display is still beautiful and dust free, but my 3GS had dust between the glass and LCD within I week.

Hmm. I came here to try to figure out what the mysterious extra window is which appears in photos of the white iPhone 4, above the "receiver" ear slot. I think it's for a light sensor, and I assumed that it was also there on the black model, but just not visible because of the black surround.

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